High value renewable waxes from agricultural waste

Wheat straw, like many agricultural waste products, contains a range of valuable compounds. These include natural waxes with properties similar to industrial wax.

BDC partner, the GCCE, developed a low-cost, green chemistry approach to extract wax from wheat straw. To commercialise the research, a consortium of Botanix, Croda Chemicals Europe and GCCE worked together: Botanix optimised and scaled up the extraction, Croda tested the wax in finished products and GCCE provided the know-how.

The work has now been scaled up successfully to 100kg batch production allowing prototyping and trials to be carried out by a range of potential end users.